An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain

Lovers and Strangers

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 
 
TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 
 
'Generous and empathetic ... opens up postwar migration in all its richness' Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian 
 
'Groundbreaking, sophisticated, original, open-minded ... essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the transformation of British society after the war but also its character today' Piers Brendon, Literary Review 
 
'Lyrical, full of wise and original observations' David Goodhart, The Times 
 
The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers - to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world and with many motives, thousands of individuals took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years here, sending most of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed - and transformed the country. 
 
Drawing on an amazing array of unusual and surprising sources, Clair Wills' wonderful new book brings to life the incredible diversity and strangeness of the migrant experience. She introduces us to lovers, scroungers, dancers, homeowners, teachers, drinkers, carers and many more to show the opportunities and excitement as much as the humiliation and poverty that could be part of the new arrivals' experience. Irish, Bengalis, West Indians, Poles, Maltese, Punjabis and Cypriots battled to fit into an often shocked Britain and, to their own surprise, found themselves making permanent homes. As Britain picked itself up again in the 1950s migrants set about changing life in their own image, through music, clothing, food, religion, but also fighting racism and casual and not so casual violence. 
 
Lovers and Strangers is an extremely important book, one that is full of enjoyable surprises, giving a voice to a generation who had to deal with the reality of life surrounded by 'white strangers' in their new country.

A lyrical account...  deeply researched and full of wise and original observations about migration

Strangers and Lovers is brimming with new archival sources, careful cullings of governmental documents and oral histories - the book encompasses poetry and fiction as well as sociological accounts.

Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the transformation of British society after the war but also its character today

Masterful... these are the stories of Britain's yesterdays, todays and tomorrows, and they could hardly be more timely.

Her well-written, readable story evolves like a novel or film script with key characters.

What you get in Lovers and Strangers is a mix of oral history, scholarly analysis and impressionistic essay

Lovers and Strangers presents a historically rich view of immigration to Britain. Wills writes with both humour and detail about the lives of thousands of single men from Poland, Ireland, the West Indies and South Asia. Many of her tales are filled with the music, alcohol and nightlife which occupied the attentions of thousands of single men

Clair Wills is a critic and cultural historian. She is the author of That Neutral island: A History of Ireland during the Second World War, which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO, and The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture. She teaches at Princeton University and divides her time between the United States and Europe.

The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers. From all over the world thousands of individuals took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years here, sending most of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed - and transformed the country. Drawing on an amazing array of unusual and surprising sources, Clair Wills' wonderful new book brings to life the incredible diversity and strangeness of the migrant experience. She introduces us to lovers, scroungers, dancers, homeowners, teachers, drinkers, carers and many more to show the opportunities and excitement as much as the humiliation and poverty that could be part of the new arrivals' experience. Irish, Bengalis, West Indians, Poles, Maltese, Punjabis and Cypriots battled to fit into an often shocked Britain and, to their own surprise, found themselves making permanent homes.

Clair Wills

Missing Persons is as close to perfect as a memoir can be; the richness of its subject honed to a poised and discerning brevity, written in unexpectedly lambent prose. It is the sum of the author’s life: both the family history she carries with and within her, but also the four decades of research and analysis that have been her intellectual existence. Only she could have written it, but it will speak to and about the lives of many

An expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist

The stories she uncovers are remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human… Her book, written with care, wit and vulnerability, shows that ordinary tragedies deserve our anger and attention.

She is deft at unpicking lies, evasions and gaps in the record, grasping that these things have political as well as private meaning… an act of fairly radical reframing

An affecting and enraging book, part memoir, part national history, about Wills’s attempt to uncover the truth about her family and the hundreds of others like it.

Always compelling and deeply moving… an unforgettable account, in microcosm, of the world of Catholic Ireland in the 20th Century: the incarceration of the so-called sinful and the emigration of others, leaving a fragmented country of secrets, enigmas and buried guilt

Not just a vivid, compelling account of Clair’s family and ancestry, but an intriguing snapshot of Ireland’s social history… rigorously researched... empathetic

Among the most supple and illuminating explorers of the intertwined cultural histories of Ireland and Britain... a dark history of loss and forgetting

Utterly engaging, fearless and acute

In its account of one family's history of silence and secrecy, Clair Wills has written a compelling book which demonstrates the uncanny universality of even the most personal stories. Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present, this is a history shaken by intimacy - a brave and rigorously humane book

If the past is a mass of tangled wool, Clair Wills frees a long strand and knits it into clarity, line by line, inviting the reader to see the complexity of the pattern she reveals. Written with elegance and erudition, Missing Persons is an extraordinary, moving achievement

Clair Wills retrieves from time’s abyss a speculative history of universal import. This is a penetrating and affecting study, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the profound contradictions, the secrets and lies that define post-famine Ireland

Clair Wills has written a book of unusual subtlety and power. Part memoir and social history, part familial detective story, it's a work that lays bare the strength and terrible frailty of the bonds that are supposed to bind us together. A superb work of narrative nonfiction

A deeply absorbing account, related with compassion in elegant prose, of how a family's past becomes embedded in its present

This is a brilliant, poignant, discomforting book but one that has the beauty of honesty and the ultimate restorative kindness that truth-telling offers. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex typology and legacy of family secrets

In this powerful memoir, Wills manages to excavate the truth about silence. Her vision as a historian reaches for the central question, why and how Irish people kept such dark secrets. How a nation of storytellers became so good at keeping violence concealed from themselves. How the information was kept, manipulated, disremembered under layers of talk into a vast store of collective forgetting. This is not only the story of Ireland in the past, but who we all are and what we have become

How far would you go for the missing? 
 
When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence. 
 
How could a whole family - a whole country - abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? 
 
To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child. 
 
There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence - stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.

Clair Wills

Praise for Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets

Missing Persons is as close to perfect as a memoir can be; the richness of its subject honed to a poised and discerning brevity, written in unexpectedly lambent prose. It is the sum of th ...

An expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist

The stories she uncovers are remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human… Her book, written with care, wit and vulnerability, shows that ordinary tragedies deserve our anger and attention.

Missing Persons is as close to perfect as a memoir can be; the richness of its subject honed to a poised and discerning brevity, written in unexpectedly lambent prose. It is the sum of th ...

An expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist

The stories she uncovers are remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human… Her book, written with care, wit and vulnerability, shows that ordinary tragedies deserve our anger and attention.

Missing Persons is as close to perfect as a memoir can be; the richness of its subject honed to a poised and discerning brevity, written in unexpectedly lambent prose. It is the sum of th ...

An expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist

The stories she uncovers are remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human… Her book, written with care, wit and vulnerability, shows that ordinary tragedies deserve our anger and attention.

Books by Clair Wills

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